Never Let ‘Em See You Bleed

You damn well should let ‘em see you bleed, because when you get back up to the plate and crush one over the center field wall they feel even worse.

Some people told me not to publish a pretty honest view of how it really is for most entrepreneurs when they start companies. It’s hard, it’s really hard. Yes, mom Mark Zuckerberg is still with the girl he was dating when he founded Facebook, and he ended up marrying her, are you really holding me to that standard.

The Jewish guilt never ends.

But you know what, screw that. I’ve gotten this far being open, honest, and letting people see me bleed a little bit, a couple drops on this blog, some on the stream. When I ran Surfview I posted just about all of my trades, and as with anyone running a momentum strategy more than half were losers, but we killed it on a few trades every quarter and walked away with home run returns.

Let ‘em see you bleed a little bit, people will respect you more, and they’ll trust you a whole lot more when you put up huge numbers.

For god sake, Estimize is less than 9 months old as a platform and we’ve got critical mass on 230 stocks. The community is more accurate at least 67% of the time, 77% of the time when we have 20 or more estimates for an earnings release. Those are some out of this fucking world numbers. Yea, we nailed this thing, and we’re certainly not afraid to say that.

We built a huge community without spending 1 cent on marketing, advertising, or user acquisition. Not 1 cent.

How about the fact that every single reporter was befuddled that we were able to get buy side analysts to share estimates with each other, something no one else has been able to do. And for all the product side execution mishaps, how about the dead simple user interface we built that I get emails all the time raving about, people asking if they can get connected to whoever built it. Sorry, we built it, and you can’t have our guys, my team rocks, stop calling to poach them.

How about the fact that we started selling data 6 months before we thought we even had a shot to simply start talking to firms about whether they were even interested. We haven’t made one outbound call to sell anything, all inbound, all them coming to us asking for it.

And as for the large financial data institutions, let’s just say they certainly know what’s going on and things are unfolding at a rapid pace.

I can go on and on about our wins, the VCs who backed us didn’t give us $1.2M because we screwed up a lot, they gave us that money because we did a lot of stuff right, and we’re going to crush this. We’re going to make more mistakes, sure, but I’m 100% certain that we’re on a curve that can’t be stopped, it is inevitable that the buy side crosses the chasm into participating in social finance, and I believe we have the best team, the best vision, and the best product to capitalize on that taking place.

But there’s something about being human that makes makes the wins that much better, that much more meaningful.

That’s why I let them see me bleed a little bit. Make no mistake though, they’re all chasing us trying to figure out how to catch up.

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